George Washington Forum: Popular Sovereignty and Populism

On March 15-16, 2019, the George Washington Forum at Ohio University, a JMC partner program, will be hosting a conference on popular sovereignty and populism. The conference intends to illuminate the concept of popular sovereignty and its related expression, populism. Participants are especially interested in the crucial continuities and discontinuities in popular sovereignty that emerge in the study of critical moments in political history. These include (but are not limited to) the theory and practice of popular sovereignty in the Italian Renaissance; seventeenth-century England; revolutionary and federal America; and revolutionary France. JMC fellows Mark Blitz and Catherine Zuckert will deliver plenary lectures and several other fellows will speak.

Catherine Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and currently a Visiting Professor at ASU’s School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership. Her fields of interest include political theory, history of political philosophy, the search for self-knowledge, and politics and literature. Her book on Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the R.R. Hawkins award from the Association of American Publishers for the best scholarly book published that year. Zuckert has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Bradley and Earhart Foundations. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, has been listed in several editions of Who’s Who in America, and was selected as a member of the Templeton Honor Role in 1998.

Mark Blitz is Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy and director of the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom at Claremont McKenna College. His research interests include political science, American politics, ancient philosophy (particularly Plato), and 21st-century philosophy (particularly Heidegger). He served during the Reagan Administration as associate director of the United States Information Agency and as a senior professional staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Blitz has received numerous teaching awards, including the American Political Science Association Award for Outstanding Teaching (2008), the Crocker Award for Merit from Claremont McKenna College (2007), and the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Pennsylvania.

The George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions at Ohio University is a participant in JMC’s Ohio Political Economy Initiative, made possible by a grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. The Forum teaches America’s foundational principles in their Western intellectual, political, and institutional contexts. It is grounded on the idea that students facing an increasingly globalized world need to understand what characterizes and distinguishes the nation in which they live and the civilization from which it emerged. The Forum helps students become enlightened citizens in a liberal democracy whose roots run deep in Western civilization, but whose ideals and interests transcend the West.